If Windows 3.1 on your Droid isn't good enough for you, how about a modern desktop OS running on your Nexus One or Sprint Evo 4G? Braniac Max from NexusOneHacks.net managed to shoehorn Ubuntu onto his Nexus One over the Independence Day weekend. Not to be outdone, a few days later it was modified to run on the Evo 4G. More details after the break. [via NexusOneHacks and GoodAndEvo]

Update: Matt wrote in to let us know that Ubuntu is running on the Droid as well. Added a video for your perusal after the break. Thanks for the tip Matt!

This doesn't run like Ubuntu does on your computer. In this case, Ubuntu runs as a sub-system on your smartphone, allowing you to switch from Android to Ubuntu and back again without any trouble. You start it from the command line in a terminal emulator and then use a VNC client to connect to the Ubuntu desktop.

This isn't for the faint of heart, folks. This involves using a ROM with a kernel that supports a loop file system (definitely not standard in the Android world folks). For the Evo, there are instructions to flash a zImage which uses a temporary kernel that goes away on reboot.

Personally I like this since I love the tech / "cyberpunk" culture. I live for this kind of tinkering. 10-to-1 if Linux doesn't BEAT "Surface" to market, it'll have an open-source equivalent soon after.

Its not the "Linux/Ubuntu community" it is the "Linux community". Ubuntu is not Linux, it is just one of many Linux distros and Ubuntu is nothing particularly special. Many of us have been using Linux far, far longer than Ubuntu has existed.

How could anyone dismiss this as impractical? I would love to be able to dock my Evo with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. A charging dock that converts the HDMI to DVI and adds in a USB port or two would be fantastic (although, for that matter, DVI may not even be necessary since many monitors support HDMI natively these days anyway).

If it's even somewhat remotely Snappy™, I'd absolutely take advantage of this. Talk about convergence.

Clueless? I'm not so sure. I believe the OP might be a bit Utopian in his assessment of running Ubuntu on a dock-able mobile device but not clueless.

As we converge towards the apex of true pocket computing, who's to say we won't have a full OS like Linux running on a mobile device that sports a touch version when un-docked and full KVM support when docked?

My only concern is that mobile battery technology, for some idiotic reason, has barely kept up.

One is accessing a local Linux over VNC so it is automatically impractical (slow, resource hog, inefficient, power hungry). Using a general Linux distribution that way would only be practical if there were an Xserver ported to the handset.

Its a great achievement, but sadly theres not a whole lot you can do with a full OS, which kinda sucks. Still... Isn't there that netbook ubuntu variant with multi-touch ? Maybe someone can get that running as a native OS on a droid device. The additional OS grunt should give us more bluetooth functionality (full HID stuff) which would then give us the ability to use mice and keyboard. Combined with most high end devices having tv out, which doesn't take too much effort to turn into HDMI or VGA... So very close to having a true pocket pc.

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